Currently, it is often very difficult inside of an organization to find the information that employees need to do their jobs. This is in contrast to consumer-targeted search such as Google or Amazon, where users can typically find the answer to their question or product of interest easily. As one motivating example, there are over 400 Million web documents containing the word “Volkswagen”. Nevertheless Google returns www.volkswagen.com as the first result for the query {volkswagen}. The typical experience in enterprise search is far worse. A user may type the query {sql} and see thousands of documents containing the term “sql” in no particular order.
Both for public web search and for Amazon catalog search, term matching is only a single component of relevance. Google and Bing use document popularity (as determined by clicks and incoming web links) to boost the position of volkwagen.com to the top. Amazon similarly has product sales figures, manufacturer reputation, and ratings that can be combined with term matching.
In contrast search within and across organizations (when it exists at all) is implemented as a text retrieval problem, where each document exists only as a collection of text, and does not have popularity, rating, or activity information. In particular, these search systems have very limited data about user behavior. Due in large part to this lack of what is called “user signal”, search systems rely heavily on content indexing. Indexing does a good job of identifying potentially relevant pieces of information, but a very poor job of ranking it. As a result, searches routinely come back with hundreds or thousands of results, with the desired information buried somewhere inside them. Employees within organizations, especially larger ones, routinely give up entirely on search systems and rely on alternative means to find the information they need (such as email, private repositories that they maintain, and the like).
It would be helpful to have a system that overcomes the above problems, as well as one that provides additional benefits. Overall, the examples herein of some prior or related systems and their associated limitations are intended to be illustrative and not exclusive. Other limitations of existing or prior systems will become apparent to those of skill in the art upon reading the following Detailed Description.